In marketing luxury real estate one segment of your target demographic comprises entrepreneurs and employees of start-up companies who have recently been acquired by a larger company, or have gone public. For example, when Facebook went public many of their employees became millionaires overnight. If you are a luxury real estate marketing professional in the Silicon Valley area of California, the probability of encountering this kind of buyer is quite high.

When we were in commercial real estate in Beverly Hills and the West Los Angeles area we enjoyed learning about some of the latest trends, technologies and new ventures before the general public even heard about them. Our expertise was high-end retail and the entertainment industry. We worked with investors, developers, restaurateurs and companies who needed to purchase or lease their retail space or office buildings. This exposed us to the leading edge of what was to come in retail, technology, entertainment and restaurants. Imagine being one of the first to know that Apple was going to start opening retail stores!

When it comes to selling a luxury home to this demographic segment you need to also understand their psycho graphics. To increase your chances of winning their business you must be able to quickly build rapport with them and speak their “dialect” of the Language of Luxury: Innovation. You need to be up on the latest trends in their fields. This gives you "social currency", which adds value to your professional practice and gives you an edge over your competition.

Here is an example of the kind of social currency in the realm of innovation. Later this fall, Mozilla, the non-profit group who created the Firefox browser, is coming out with a free web-based video editor that will change how we tell stories on the Internet. It is called Popcorn.

In the same way that you edit video content now using a time line to combine video clips, audio elements, special effects and photos, Popcorn allows you to pull content right from existing web sites. For instance, you can use a Google map as the background for an inserted video clip of you describing specific locations on the map. You can also add call out boxes containing information about those locations that are hyper linked to more information or additional videos about those points on the map. Viewers can click on the call out boxes and watch those additional videos or view a photo gallery or a web page about it.

It is fun to stay ahead of the curve by keeping up with new trends that affect your target market and ideal clients. This kind of social currency can give you a competitive edge when working with those clients, whose personal values include being innovative, which is a key element of their psycho graphics.